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Monday, June 22, 2009

Five Canard Stud (taking down the Darwinist canard table and pulling out the chair)

In the comments thread of my last post a back and forth broke out between me and creeper which boiled down to accusations of deception and eventually I considered that creeper had thrown down the gauntlet with his false accusations and complete fabrications (from my point of view) and I needed to step up to the challenge. In the words of creeper, "Have at it." So I shall, in two posts that will first pull the foundations out from under Darwinism and then directly refute it.

Darwinists in present days remind me of President Clinton when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. First came dismissal, then denials, then vehement denials ("I did NOT have sex with that woman!") and then finally the lame admission of guilt. In terms of Darwinism and the evidence, they are up to the vehement denial stage. Their desperation was revealed by the IDA-is-the-missing-link hilarity, a specimen of Lemur that had been in hand for 26 years that suddenly was a magical missing link!!!!! Only, it wasn't anything of the sort. It was simply a Lemur, a particular species of Lemur that is now extinct. Like a Dodo Bird or a Passenger Pigeon. Just another animal that didn't make the final cut. Lately Darwinists have been pulling this kind of prank on the public but in the end their desperation is revealed as Don Batten mentioned in the above linked article:

"And just to cap it off, in this “year of Darwin”, they named the creature after the atheists’ hero, Charles Darwin: Darwinius masillae. (One wonders what Charles Darwin would say now, if only he could (cf. Luke 16:26–31).) As Richard Dawkins said, Darwin enabled him to be an “intellectually fulfilled atheist”. That is the reason for all the hoopla over Darwin, which seems to be at fever pitch in this “Year of Darwin”.

The claim that Darwinius ‘could finally confirm Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution’ tacitly admits that it has not yet been confirmed

I don’t think I have ever seen such blatantly over-stated claims on a fossil find, and I have seen a few, including one by a major co-author of this paper: Philip Gingerich’s claims for Pakicetus back in 1983. Gingerich had a couple of scraps of a skull of a mammal from Pakistan and claimed it as the evolutionary precursor of whales. He embellished the story with an artist’s drawing of what Pakicetus (“whale from Pakistan”) looked like, with legs becoming flippers, a tail fluke developing and the imaginary creature diving for fish. Cute. Gingerich claimed it was “perfectly intermediate, a missing link between earlier land mammals and later, full-fledged whales”. With such a strong, confident claim from the fossil expert, who could doubt that evolution was true? Seven years later, other paleontologists published a paper describing the rest of Pakicetus and the now almost complete fossil showed that Gingerich’s imagination had really run away with him and the animal was not the missing link he thought it was. See: Not at all like a whale.

Apparently many paleontologists appreciate this sort of over-the-top, publicity-seeking behaviour in support of evolutionary story-telling, because they recently elected Gingerich the president of the American Paleontological Association."

Darwinists are in trouble as it is, so this is kind of like shooting ducks in a barrel. Darwin Duck?

Uniformitarianism, which was a fundamental foundation for Darwinism, has been falsified by the nature of the hundreds and thousands of feet of sedimentary rock layers which have been shown to be associated with catastrophic events. The cell, once thought to be a simple mechanism, is rather remarkably complex, far beyond the complexity of any machine or device imaginable during the time of Darwin. Careful examination of DNA shows it to be a blueprint for life with more information in one strand than Darwin could find in the biggest library in London. Gene mapping has revealed that structures that appear to be similar in differing organisms often come from different locations on the gene, thus presenting yet another in a series of hurdles for Darwinism to surmount. I could go on and on but first we will take off the legs of the Darwinist table, which are the naturalistic materialistic assumptions that underpin Darwinism. Then we will pull out the chair. Then, in my next post, I will reveal why the meal Darwinists try to serve to the public is rotten to the point of being hazardous. But first let us take out the table legs and the chair.

FIVE CANARDS

1) The Universe has a natural cause. This is a fallacy according to the First Law of Thermodynamics, which states that nothing is being either created or destroyed. If nothing gets created or destroyed in the natural world, how do you attribute the creation of all things to natural processes? In the world of today, this kind of logic is called "Epic Fail!" Naturalistic materialists say that by some chance...CHANCE? It somehow happened by some miraculous unobservable chance event. Despite the First Law of Thermodynamics.

Now, allowing for the supernatural one could conclude that a supernatural entity superior to the temporal and natural Universe created that Universe. It may require faith but it does not strain logic. It also does not violate the First Law. Nothing is being created or destroyed because God made all things and contained them within a boundary of logical and understandable laws, including a conservation of all things He created. Only God can create and only God can destroy.

2) Life came from non-life. This violates the Law of Abiogenesis. No one has ever observed life coming from non-life and no scientist has been able to even conceive of and express a scenario in which such a thing might occur. Science actually has no definition for what life itself consists of, for there is no structural or chemical difference between a living person and a person who has just exhaled his last breath. All structures and organisms and systems will be exactly the same, they just have no more spark of life...which science cannot define or segregate from the organism itself. Darwinists just say that somehow, by some chance, it just happened, okay?

God claims to have given life to creatures and within breathing animals the Bible says there is within them the "breath of life." A supernatural Creator capable of creating the entire Universe is not going to find the invention of life to be much harder.

3) More complex life came from simple life. This violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that everything is moving from hot to cold, from organized to disorganized, from energy to entropy. (Technically these laws are stated by beginning with "It is impossible that..." and what follows is usually a bit more boring and less descriptive so I use more common phrases. But I am capable of dealing with the original language of any of these laws if you insist upon it, commenters.) Your hot soup cools off, your neat room gets messy, your smooth skin gets wrinkled, your deck needs to be stained again and so on and so forth. Darwinists claim that macroevolution is causing organisms to go in the opposite direction of the natural movement of all natural things. It is the water that runs uphill, it is the rock that unripples the pond, it is a canard. The Darwinist begins by saying that "by chance mutation..."

God the supernatural being capable of making simple life forms could have and did create complex life forms. It is logical and it fits what we observe in the world today. We can see no way for complex life to have just happened, we never see it happening, but if God created all animals then what we see today makes perfect sense.

The Law of Conservation of Information

Evolutionary biology has steadfastly resisted attributing CSI to intelligent causation. Although Manfred Eigen recognizes that the central problem of evolutionary biology is the origin of CSI, he has no thought of attributing CSI to intelligent causation. According to Eigen natural causes are adequate to explain the origin of CSI. The only question for Eigen is which natural causes explain the origin of CSI. The logically prior question of whether natural causes are even in-principle capable of explaining the origin of CSI he ignores. And yet it is a question that undermines Eigen's entire project. Natural causes are in-principle incapable of explaining the origin of CSI. To be sure, natural causes can explain the flow of CSI, being ideally suited for transmitting already existing CSI. What natural causes cannot do, however, is originate CSI. This strong proscriptive claim, that natural causes can only transmit CSI but never originate it, I call the Law of Conservation of Information. It is this law that gives definite scientific content to the claim that CSI is intelligently caused. The aim of this last section is briefly to sketch the Law of Conservation of Information (a full treatment will be given in Uncommon Descent, a book I am jointly authoring with Stephen Meyer and Paul Nelson).

To see that natural causes cannot account for CSI is straightforward. Natural causes comprise chance and necessity (cf. Jacques Monod's book by that title). Because information presupposes contingency, necessity is by definition incapable of producing information, much less complex specified information. For there to be information there must be a multiplicity of live possibilities, one of which is actualized, and the rest of which are excluded. This is contingency. But if some outcome B is necessary given antecedent conditions A, then the probability of B given A is one, and the information in B given A is zero. If B is necessary given A, Formula (*) reduces to I(A&B) = I(A), which is to say that B contributes no new information to A. It follows that necessity is incapable of generating new information. Observe that what Eigen calls "algorithms" and "natural laws" fall under necessity.

Since information presupposes contingency, let us take a closer look at contingency. Contingency can assume only one of two forms. Either the contingency is a blind, purposeless contingency-which is chance; or it is a guided, purposeful contingency-which is intelligent causation. Since we already know that intelligent causation is capable of generating CSI (cf. section 4), let us next consider whether chance might also be capable of generating CSI. First notice that pure chance, entirely unsupplemented and left to its own devices, is incapable of generating CSI. Chance can generate complex unspecified information, and chance can generate non-complex specified information. What chance cannot generate is information that is jointly complex and specified.

Biologists by and large do not dispute this claim. Most agree that pure chance-what Hume called the Epicurean hypothesis-does not adequately explain CSI. Jacques Monod (1972) is one of the few exceptions, arguing that the origin of life, though vastly improbable, can nonetheless be attributed to chance because of a selection effect. Just as the winner of a lottery is shocked at winning, so we are shocked to have evolved. But the lottery was bound to have a winner, and so too something was bound to have evolved. Something vastly improbable was bound to happen, and so, the fact that it happened to us (i.e., that we were selected-hence the name selection effect) does not preclude chance. This is Monod's argument and it is fallacious. It fails utterly to come to grips with specification. Moreover, it confuses a necessary condition for life's existence with its explanation. Monod's argument has been refuted by the philosophers John Leslie (1989), John Earman (1987), and Richard Swinburne (1979). It has also been refuted by the biologists Francis Crick (1981, ch. 7), Bernd-Olaf Küppers (1990, ch. 6), and Hubert Yockey (1992, ch. 9). Selection effects do nothing to render chance an adequate explanation of CSI.

Most biologists therefore reject pure chance as an adequate explanation of CSI. The problem here is not simply one of faulty statistical reasoning. Pure chance is also scientifically unsatisfying as an explanation of CSI. To explain CSI in terms of pure chance is no more instructive than pleading ignorance or proclaiming CSI a mystery. It is one thing to explain the occurrence of heads on a single coin toss by appealing to chance. It is quite another, as Küppers (1990, p. 59) points out, to follow Monod and take the view that "the specific sequence of the nucleotides in the DNA molecule of the first organism came about by a purely random process in the early history of the earth." CSI cries out for explanation, and pure chance won't do. As Richard Dawkins (1987, p. 139) correctly notes, "We can accept a certain amount of luck in our [scientific] explanations, but not too much."

If chance and necessity left to themselves cannot generate CSI, is it possible that chance and necessity working together might generate CSI? The answer is No. Whenever chance and necessity work together, the respective contributions of chance and necessity can be arranged sequentially. But by arranging the respective contributions of chance and necessity sequentially, it becomes clear that at no point in the sequence is CSI generated. Consider the case of trial-and-error (trial corresponds to necessity and error to chance). Once considered a crude method of problem solving, trial-and-error has so risen in the estimation of scientists that it is now regarded as the ultimate source of wisdom and creativity in nature. The probabilistic algorithms of computer science (e.g., genetic algorithms-see Forrest, 1993) all depend on trial-and-error. So too, the Darwinian mechanism of mutation and natural selection is a trial-and-error combination in which mutation supplies the error and selection the trial. An error is committed after which a trial is made. But at no point is CSI generated.

Natural causes are therefore incapable of generating CSI. This broad conclusion I call the Law of Conservation of Information, or LCI for short. LCI has profound implications for science. Among its corollaries are the following: (1) The CSI in a closed system of natural causes remains constant or decreases. (2) CSI cannot be generated spontaneously, originate endogenously, or organize itself (as these terms are used in origins-of-life research). (3) The CSI in a closed system of natural causes either has been in the system eternally or was at some point added exogenously (implying that the system though now closed was not always closed). (4) In particular, any closed system of natural causes that is also of finite duration received whatever CSI it contains before it became a closed system.

This last corollary is especially pertinent to the nature of science for it shows that scientific explanation is not coextensive with reductive explanation. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and many scientists are convinced that proper scientific explanations must be reductive, moving from the complex to the simple. Thus Dawkins (1987, p. 316) will write, "The one thing that makes evolution such a neat theory is that it explains how organized complexity can arise out of primeval simplicity." Thus Dennett (1995, p. 153) will view any scientific explanation that moves from simple to complex as "question-begging." Thus Dawkins (1987, p. 13) will explicitly equate proper scientific explanation with what he calls "hierarchical reductionism," according to which "a complex entity at any particular level in the hierarchy of organization" must properly be explained "in terms of entities only one level down the hierarchy." While no one will deny that reductive explanation is extremely effective within science, it is hardly the only type of explanation available to science. The divide-and-conquer mode of analysis behind reductive explanation has strictly limited applicability within science. In particular, this mode of analysis is utterly incapable of making headway with CSI. CSI demands an intelligent cause. Natural causes will not do.

A million monkeys typing for a million years actually don't wind up writing Romeo and Juliet. Shannon's theory was an attempt to quantify amounts of information but it doesn't understand the content, only the volume. As Karl Steinbuch said, according to Shannon a "kilogram of gold has the same value as a kilogram of sand." As Jean Cocteau famously remarked, "The greatest literary work of art is nothing but a scrambled alphabet" if one only measures the amount of information. Life is packed with information and that information must have an intelligent source.SETI is, as you know, the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. What are all those ATA listening dishes aimed outward seeking? Information! The idea is that if information is found amongst the noise reaching the Earth, it had an intelligent source. Imagine if we turned our attention inwards towards the cell? We would find DNA, we would find information integrated within life and we would understand that an intelligence designed all living things. If our logic was consistent and we were not driven by assumptions that preclude the existence of God then we would expect to see evidence of an intelligent designer, the Creator God. And we do, from within the tiniest portions of the cell on outwards we see intricate design with redundancies and contingencies built in. We find creatures that depend upon each other for existence and it strains credulity to believe they just happened to develop by chance together. In fact, just trying to imagine a way in which RNA, let alone DNA, could happen by chance is beyond any reasonable scientist. No one has presented any hypothesis that has a chance of being possible.

5) Uniformitarianism. Darwinism in all of its forms relies upon millions and millions of years of death and mutation and natural selection and the constant intervention of Chance, the Evolution Fairy to take us from simple early life to the millions of varieties of life forms we have now. Once geologists and ordinary folks figured that the rock layers on Earth were left over from the Noahic Flood, but over time as scientists and common man drifted away from the concept of a Creator God there were people like James Hutton and Charles Lyell who proposed that the rock layers are actually laid down by long-term uniform processes and represented hundreds of millions of years of Earth time written in stone.

This was a boon to Darwinists, for if the rock layers were evidence of many millions of years then there was an outside chance (there is that word again) that over multiple millions of years the unobserved process known as macroevolution would have happened! The fossils must therefore be a continuum of organisms evolving from simple to complex forms. It was epiphany!

It was greatly mistaken.

We now know that every sedimentary rock layer has evidence of catastrophism. We can see that most layering is obviously from some kind of major hydrological event. Some can be attributable to volcanic activities, mudslides, and avalanches but most involve water. All of these rock layers fit into the creationist scenario as part of the Noahic Flood and the events that followed the flood, including an ice age that may well have lasted a good 500 years past the end of the flood itself. Some rock layers stretch across multiple continents and are massive beyond measure. Many of them cross or alternate, as you would see in flood patterns but could not have in a uniformitarian hypothesis. There are also tree trunks that thrust through multiple layers, a phenomenon that produced some truly ludicrous suggestions from uniformitarians before they began to disperse and rethink.

We also understand that fossils are organisms that had to be buried very rapidly and then preserved away from the normal bacterial and insect population that would break them down as carrion and eventually to dust. Being buried under tons of mud and water away from direct oxygen sources during a world-wide catastrophic flood produces conditions that allow even Jellyfish to be fossilized! The idea that rock layers represent ages of time is outdated and must eventually be abandoned by honest and reasonable men.

~~~~~~~

There are bottom-dwelling ocean creatures found in rock formations at mountaintops around the globe. There are all sorts of extinct creatures found and very few look like the animals and plants we have now. On the other hand, some fossil creatures are EXACTLY as they are found in the rock records. How could it be that some creatures evolve like crazy and some stay just the same? How can it be that all fossils found are complete organisms and plants that in no way have transitional systems that are observable and yet Darwinism demands transitions?

In my companion post to this one, I will take the reader through macroevolution, microevolution and define and demonstrate precisely what speciation is. In the process I expect to hoist Darwinists on their own petard, so to speak.

In a preemptive strike, I can tell you that some may wish to comment in protest that Darwinism does not even discuss the advent of the Universe or how first life came to be or how information was input into life. My response is that, if you are a naturalistic materialist, you must have a world view. Your world view will require that all things have a natural explanation. So -

No Universe, no Darwinists. Do Darwinists wish to concede that God created the Universe?No first life, no Darwinists. Do Darwinists wish to concede that God created life?No Information, no Darwinists. Do Darwinists wish to concede that God created information?

IF Darwinists will concede all of that, who needs them to explain all living things today? If God is the answer to those other questions then He makes a logical answer to the fourth question, too. If not, Darwinists need explanations for the first three. Compris?

A consistent world view has an explanation for where the Universe came from, where life came from, where information came from and how such a great wealth of plant and animal life can flourish on this planet when we can see no signs whatever of life anywhere else in the Universe.

This post has destroyed the underpinnings of Darwinism. Next post takes out the rest of it to the trash heap where it belongs.

30 comments:

Anonymous
said...

This post has destroyed the underpinnings of Darwinism.

150 years of science down the drain!

You really should have split your five sections into separate posts. There are so many errors to point out here, that I just see a mass of comments and many, many things that just won't be addressed by Radar.

Then the post will get buried. Then Radar will claim victory. Or, rather, continue to claim victory since "darwinism" (whatever that means) has already been destroyed.

Based on what we know now, it's easy to see how Gingerich went wrong. The earbones that he found had some unusual features...they were primitive versions of structures that existed in cetaceans but in no other known mammal.

But it turned out that the modified earbones evolved much earlier than the other whale-like features, and Pakicetus wasn't very fish-like; it looked something like a dog with hooves. It apparently spent a lot of time in the water, and the ears had started adapting for improved underwater hearing.

If you scroll further down the page, you can see more recent fossils of animals that became progressively more whale-like. Over time, the legs shorten and eventually disappear, the tail becomes more adapted for swimming, and the nostrils move backward along the snout.

Anyway, that's pretty much how science works. Gingerich did some of the earliest research in whale evolution, so he was working with the least amount of information and naturally made mistakes. Later researchers were able to build on his work and come up with a more detailed model.

Radar, what's with the evasion? What does this have to do with the subject we were discussing, namely your erroneous claim that the theory of evolution predicts that bacteria will turn into something other than bacteria in a limited lab experiment - instead you're throwing a bunch of long-discredited arguments at the wall to see what sticks and then pat yourself on the back for having "destroyed the underpinnings of Darwinism" when you haven't come close to doing anything of the sort.

"Uniformitarianism, which was a fundamental foundation for Darwinism, has been falsified by the nature of the hundreds and thousands of feet of sedimentary rock layers which have been shown to be associated with catastrophic events."

That would come as a surprise to modern geologists. The principle was amended somewhat to include the influence of occasional catastrophes, but has not fundamentally changed, certainly not in any way that affects the theory of evolution.

"The cell, once thought to be a simple mechanism, is rather remarkably complex, far beyond the complexity of any machine or device imaginable during the time of Darwin."

So?

"Careful examination of DNA shows it to be a blueprint for life with more information in one strand than Darwin could find in the biggest library in London."

Again, so?

"Gene mapping has revealed that structures that appear to be similar in differing organisms often come from different locations on the gene, thus presenting yet another in a series of hurdles for Darwinism to surmount."

This would be more a problem for creationists (though nothing really is a problem for creationists, is it? God did it, and God works in mysterious ways, end of story) than for the theory of evolution. It seems you're describing convergent evolution here, and that's not a problem or hurdle for the theory of evolution at all.

"I could go on and on..."

Why bother? You're being both incoherent and wrong. What is the point you're hoping to make?

"1) The Universe has a natural cause. This is a fallacy according to the First Law of Thermodynamics, which states that nothing is being either created or destroyed."

The 1st LOT states that energy can only be transformed, not created or destroyed.

Indicating that this law was in place at the beginning of the Universe means that you're fully on board with uniformitarianism (your mockery of it in the previous paragraph aside).

I think it's fair to ask why the Universe has to have had a beginning. If there was a Big Bang, was there anything before it? Was it a serial expansion and contraction, featuring transformations of energy into matter and vice versa?

And sorry, just calling something God doesn't get you a get-out-of-jail-free card. If you insist on uniformitarianism and want to invoke the 1st LOT, then God would be violating the 1st LOT by creating something out of nothing, so no go. Come up with something better.

There is no Law of Abiogenesis. Perhaps you're thinking of the Law of Biogenesis, which stated that modern life forms (such as mice in stacks of hay, moulds on bread, maggots in rotting food) do not arise spontaneously, as had been thought in previous centuries. Needless to say, it's true as far as it goes, but extremely limited in scope, and it is not in conflict with abiogenesis, the study of the origin of life.

"No one has ever observed life coming from non-life and no scientist has been able to even conceive of and express a scenario in which such a thing might occur."

"Science actually has no definition for what life itself consists of, for there is no structural or chemical difference between a living person and a person who has just exhaled his last breath."

Again, not that hard to find. Why not make the effort before publishing such claims?

"All structures and organisms and systems will be exactly the same, they just have no more spark of life...which science cannot define or segregate from the organism itself. Darwinists just say that somehow, by some chance, it just happened, okay?"

Not by some chance, and this is a prime creationist canard. Natural selection is not mere chance.

Your making this claim is either deception on your part or proof that you don't understand the theory of evolution. Neither is all that flattering, of course, but if you have another explanation, let's hear it.

"God claims to have given life to creatures and within breathing animals the Bible says there is within them the "breath of life." A supernatural Creator capable of creating the entire Universe is not going to find the invention of life to be much harder."

Yes, and other deities have made other claims. But if you're going to claim that complex life can not arise via evolution, but has to be designed, then that immediately gets us to the obvious point that the designer himself has to be more complex than that which he has designed, and only kicks the question of where "life" (now in the form of the designer) came from a little further up the road. All you've done is given the non-answer a fancy-sounding name.

I note that this is a two part post. The whole bacteria thing is dealt with in part two.

No, I state clearly that God, who is not natural but supernatural, created the Universe and the LOT as part of creation. You had better rethink your answer.

Geologists who have not changed their thinking are wishful dogmatists who have not yet faced facts.

creeper, conceived scenarios that could actually happen would be my criteria, not fairy tales. Go ahead and give us one and I will rip it to shreds.

chaos, your answer is free of any facts. Not your fault, you are just repeating the company line but how do you know and by what means do all these snouts move and legs shorten and so on? Beyond hopeful and wishful thinking where is the evidence for this? Pakicetus was just flat ridiculous, another example of a paleontologist taking a few pieces of bone, getting a good story and a creative artist and then telling a fairy tale.

"3) More complex life came from simple life. This violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that everything is moving from hot to cold, from organized to disorganized, from energy to entropy."

Oh man, Radar, we've been over this and over this. This applies to a closed system. It doesn't mean that entropy increases everywhere all the time.

It is possible for entropy to decrease locally, which is what makes it possible, for example, for you to be born.

"Darwinists claim that macroevolution is causing organisms to go in the opposite direction of the natural movement of all natural things. It is the water that runs uphill, it is the rock that unripples the pond, it is a canard. The Darwinist begins by saying that "by chance mutation...""

Again, not chance but natural selection. Keep misrepresenting all you want, all it'll do is make you look uninformed.

Tell me, Radar, do you think the 2nd LOT prevents or is in conflict with reproduction?

Do you think the 2nd LOT prevents or is in conflict with heredity with variations?

Do you think the 2nd LOT prevents or is in conflict with selection?

Because if it doesn't, then this point falls apart completely. Natural selection can go about its business just fine.

(Besides, you've already conceded natural selection, even if you insist on calling it variation within kind, so you can't now claim that it's in violation of the 2nd LOT.)

"God the supernatural being capable of making simple life forms could have and did create complex life forms. It is logical and it fits what we observe in the world today. We can see no way for complex life to have just happened, we never see it happening, but if God created all animals then what we see today makes perfect sense."

Since your magic creature is an answer to everything, being hypothetical, invisible, mysterious in intention, all-powerful etc., of course you can fit it anywhere you wish. That doesn't mean it makes perfect sense.

But if you want to insist on it, then please demonstrate how God did it, if not by evolution. The who that you're proposing here is not enough, and frankly makes as much sense as any other hypothetical being.

How did God do it? By what mechanism? If God is going to dabble outside of the supernatural and in the natural world, then his/her/its work becomes subject to scientific investigation.

I have to go back to work for now, but the closed/open system argument was falsified by me in the blog earlier and has no application. There are no demonstrable violations of the 2nd LOT in nature happening today and experts in the field will tell you that.

Speciation does not violate the 2nd LOT as I will demonstrate in part two. It actually obeys it.

"I note that this is a two part post. The whole bacteria thing is dealt with in part two."

I can smell the strawmen already...

"No, I state clearly that God, who is not natural but supernatural, created the Universe and the LOT as part of creation. You had better rethink your answer."

Ah yes, the just-so story just grows by the minute. And your evidence for this is what exactly? Some vague wording in Genesis?

I don't need to rethink my answer. The concept of God doesn't answer the questions that you would have it answer, such as the origin of complexity and intelligence; it merely complicates them and kicks them further up the road.

You're simply proposing a hypothetical entity that for no explained reason is outside the rules within which we're trying to answer these questions. That's not an answer, it's an evasion.

"Geologists who have not changed their thinking are wishful dogmatists who have not yet faced facts."

Thanks for the vague non-answer. Which supposed facts would you be referring to?

"creeper, conceived scenarios that could actually happen would be my criteria, not fairy tales."

Well that's Genesis out the window then.

"Go ahead and give us one and I will rip it to shreds."

I've given you a list. Let me know when you're done. No skipping now, and no vague evasion stuff. When you say "rip it to shreds" I expect detailed scientific rebuttals. Or just admit ignorance of this subject, that would be easier.

Your 4th "canard" rests almost entirely on one of the prime creationist canards, namely the false dichotomy of chance vs. intelligent causation, leaving natural selection out of the mix. So not much of a dismissal of the theory of evolution here either, merely an evasion of it.

And of course I expect you're willing to claim the get-out-of-jail-free card known as God to get past this, right? Figures.

- The existence of catastrophes does not stand in conflict with modern understanding of uniformitarianism, and the fact that there is evidence of catastrophes in the geological record is not a falsification of uniformitarianism.

"The idea that rock layers represent ages of time is outdated and must eventually be abandoned by honest and reasonable men."

Outdated?! It's the current scientific consensus and a progression from the idea of a young Earth. And it's consistent with the fossil record, something that would be impossible in a YEC scenario.

Since you bring up rock layers, fossils in their respective rock layers are quite a problem for YECs that remains unaddressable. Why are fossils consistently buried in line with their location in the phylogenetic tree? Why was it possible to locate Tiktaalik by making predictions using the rock layers and the phylogenetic tree? According to the creationist model, that shouldn't have been possible. It was a prediction that, if true, confirmed the theory of evolution and falsified the YEC model.

"There are bottom-dwelling ocean creatures found in rock formations at mountaintops around the globe. There are all sorts of extinct creatures found and very few look like the animals and plants we have now. On the other hand, some fossil creatures are EXACTLY as they are found in the rock records. How could it be that some creatures evolve like crazy and some stay just the same?"

Did you expect a uniform rate of evolution? Read up on the subject; this isn't part of the theory of evolution.

It all depends on selection pressure; some creatures don't change for ages since they have little reason to (e.g. sharks), other creatures are under more pressure to change and so will change more rapidly.

"How can it be that all fossils found are complete organisms and plants that in no way have transitional systems that are observable and yet Darwinism demands transitions?"

Did you expect creatures with half an arm or something? And you're that guy who claimed that you do "in fact understand evolution"...?

All creatures are transitional if they change later on. There's nothing that stamps one creature as "transitional" and another as, say, "fully formed". For example, we could be a transitional form if our descendants hundreds of thousands of years from now have evolved further.

"My response is that, if you are a naturalistic materialist, you must have a world view. Your world view will require that all things have a natural explanation."

Naturalistic materialism is of course the default setting for scientific work, regardless of whether it's carried out by an atheist or a member of any religion you care to name.

As for me, I'm what you might call a secular humanist, but I just wanted to point out that members of various religions can and do subscribe to the theory of evolution as the most likely explanation for the variety of life on our planet.

"So -

No Universe, no Darwinists. Do Darwinists wish to concede that God created the Universe?"

But God creating the Universe? This is one of many, many creation myths, and in the absence of any proof, it would be foolish to "concede" this claim, since there is nothing that makes this one more likely than the others. It was a nice little fairy tale when we were kids, but come on. Let me know when you can disprove all those other creation myths.

"No first life, no Darwinists. Do Darwinists wish to concede that God created life?"

Nah. I'll gladly concede that a long time ago there was such a thing as first life. So first life, Darwinists. Cool.

Is God alive, btw? Then you probably meant "God created life on our planet", not "God created all life everywhere". Because he can't have created himself, can he?

"No Information, no Darwinists. Do Darwinists wish to concede that God created information?"

Heck no! God who supposedly knows all must surely have access to all kinds of information - all of it basically, right? So he couldn't possibly have created it, since he couldn't exist without it.

If anything, it's you who should concede that God can't exist without information.

"IF Darwinists will concede all of that, who needs them to explain all living things today?"

Of course "Darwinists" don't concede any of these. You really didn't think this through very well, did you?

Who needs the theory of evolution to explain all living things today? Well we do, because it's the best explanation we have. The alternative consists of some religious types saying that "God did it", but they seem content to leave it at that instead of doing some actual scientific research to confirm their hypothesis.

"If God is the answer to those other questions then He makes a logical answer to the fourth question, too. If not, Darwinists need explanations for the first three. Compris?"

"A consistent world view has an explanation for where the Universe came from, where life came from, where information came from and how such a great wealth of plant and animal life can flourish on this planet when we can see no signs whatever of life anywhere else in the Universe."

It's news to me that a world view has to tick all those boxes, when some of the brightest minds on the planet don't even have some of these answers.

As for me, I don't mind saying "I don't know", and I don't even have to spell it "God did it". There are various theories for the origin of the universe and for the origin of life, and I don't expect we'll have a certain answer to the former in my lifetime; the latter, perhaps.

"This post has destroyed the underpinnings of Darwinism. Next post takes out the rest of it to the trash heap where it belongs."

Hope you're a bit more on the ball in that post, Radar. This was a pretty weak rehash.

Wow, that's some great stuff creeper. Nice work. You and scohen really put some time and thought into your comments here. Thank you. Oh and Lava and Chaos nice work as well.

I think that my favorite part though, was when Radar asked Chaos a question. He actually said, "Not your fault, you are just repeating the company line but how do you know and by what means do all these snouts move and legs shorten and so on?" Um, can I ring in on this one Radar? I think the answer is... wait for it... Evolution. ding ding ding. Considering your claims of being ann expert on the subject, I'm really supprised you missed that one Radar. Seriously though, it's this kind of response from dear ol' Radar that really winds me up, I mean, why does he think he can adress Chaos the way he does in that whole retort? Fine, be a jerk to me Radar (as you may know, I enjoy being kind of a jerk to you sometimes too, so were even), but chaos is almost always very respectfull and his post here, makes perfect (and factual) sense. I guess, just as creeper pointed out, for a guy that really wants us all to "find jesus", you sure have a funny way of showing it.

Oh and you still havent addressed the idea from annony concerning the "great guys" you know that will be spending eternity in hell because they chose to go another route than you did in life (and only for part of your life I might add). I mean, the fact that you are going to keep bashing them over the head with your beliefs in order to try to help them avoid an eternity of unimaginable torture, to me says that, deep down, in your heart of hearts, you know that they do not deserve that fate. Doesn't it just beg the question, what kind of surpreme being roasts souls forever because they chose not to believe in Him? Sorry Radar, I just don't see all that "love" you always talk about.

I have to go back to work for now, but the closed/open system argument was falsified by me in the blog earlier and has no application. There are no demonstrable violations of the 2nd LOT in nature happening today and experts in the field will tell you that.

I love these assertive statements like "destroyed the underpinnings" and "argument was falsified by me".

What about the moment of fertilization? A human starts as a single cell, the egg. Certainly, a human ends up much more complex than that egg. No? This system does not tend toward decay and disorder- it becomes more complex.

Why does it not violate the 2nd LOT? BECAUSE IT IS NOT A CLOSED SYSTEM! And the earth is not a closed system, either. Solar energy is continuously inputted.

This has to be the most depressing post that Radar has posted to date. I read it and realize that over the past three years, he's learned nothing. What we have here is either someone who is blatantly intellectually dishonest or, as creeper put it is 'unserious about the issue'. All my time here has been completely wasted, and what's most depressing is that at one point, we convinced Radar not to use the term 'Darwinist', yet he's regressed from even extending this small courtesy.

Frankly, citing thermodynamics is just the dregs of creationism, and I previously provided several examples that Radar has not acknowledged (diamonds, the sun converting hydrogen to helium, stellar formation, etc). That he still trots out this completely debunked line of reasoning baffles me. Either it demonstrates a complete lack of knowledge of pretty much what thermodynamics *is*, or we're dealing with a tremendously impressive parody blog.

And in a nutshell, this is why creationism is so pernicious. What we have here is someone who really doesn't have much knowledge in science (Sorry Radar, the second law and your hackneyed understanding of natural selection make this statement true) spouting off incoherent talking points. Somehow this represents the other side of the 'debate'. Sad that the average American can't easily see that one side is full of hot air.

Imagine if the debate over the geometry of the earth were as contentious. We'd have Radar over there arguing with us 'Pythagoreans' about how there was a global conspiracy keeping the truth hidden from us.

Creeper: Herculean effort here --extremely impressive.

Radar: I'm truly sorry that you don't/can't/won't understand this. Not doing so does not help your argument one bit, and makes you look foolish. I want to believe that you're a better person than that, and I feel that if I could just talk to you for a day or so we'd hammer out your misconceptions (as an aside, I considered wagering you a week in SF on my dime if Obama won the election. Of course if Obama lost, I'd have to go to Indiana for a week). Furthermore, I've read and re-read Creeper's comments, and nowhere did he come close to lying, distorting the truth or treating his audience like idiots --quite the contrary actually. The jump from bacteria to single celled eukaryotes is indeed greater than the difference between a human and a tree. After all, both humans and trees are in the same domain, while bacteria are not. This isn't even close to controversial unless you want to tear down the entire classification system as well.

chaos, your answer is free of any facts. Not your fault, you are just repeating the company line but how do you know and by what means do all these snouts move and legs shorten and so on?

The issue isn't so much the facts as the interpretation of the facts. The facts are that the fossil bones shown on the web page physically exist and were physically dug up.

We can argue about what that means. Some people might say that the fossils show an evolutionary transition from ungulates (hooved mammals) to cetaceans (legless water-dwelling mammals). Other people might say that God created a large number of species that were intermediate between ungulates and cetaceans and then allowed them all to go extinct for some reason.

If we assume that God created them, then the fossils tell us something about God: Not only does He like to re-use existing patterns, but He only likes to combine patterns according to a strict set of rules. (So we can be confident that we'll never find a fossil of a griffin or a medusa or a cockatrice, because those combinations aren't allowed under the rules.)

Like Creeper pointed out, scientists might not believe that God created those rules, but they've understood the rules well enough to guess that something like Tiktaalik must have existed, and they even knew approximately where to look for the fossil. That's really pretty impressive!

That's why I don't think that the Pakicetus misinterpretation is an embarrassment for science. For whatever reason, God didn't want to tell us the rules He used for making ungulate-cetacean intermediates, so we had to deduce those rules on our own. Gingerich did the best he could with the information he had available, and he was willing to revise his theory as more information came in. I think that's about all we can ask.

Also, I just found out that Gingerich is still around. Here's his personal webpage on whale evolution.

Do we have any more questions about Pakicetus? I could probably e-mail him and get a response if I try not to sound too crackpotty.

LOL, come on creeper; don't tell me you haven't seen through Radar's tactics yet: just one day and there's a new month. Which means all these articles will disappear below the fold and Radar can conveniently forget your excellent rebuttal and claim he has 'utterly destroyed Darwinism'.

Nope, I have other priorities. Had to write a few articles for the sports site and close out business before going to visit my daughter's family on the 1st. The next post after that will continue this whole thing. In fact, I probably need two posts to finish it off and get back to my Genesis series. But there is a real world and other jobs to do that come before blogging sometimes.

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The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all men, charity.Francis Maitland Balfour